Battered Woman Syndrome As A Legal Defense

The use of the battered woman syndrome defense in the courts is controversial, particularly when women turn to homicide in response to a partner's abuse. Scholars worry that the syndrome has created a standard to which all battered women are compared. This book provides a comprehensive examination of the evolution of the syndrome, its effectiveness in court, and the contributions made by psychologists and legal scholars to aid our understanding of the use of battered woman syndrome evidence in trials of abused women who kill. Of particular interest is the influence of history, gender roles, and stereotypes in the evaluation of defendants who claim to suffer from the syndrome.

In this latest edition of her groundbreaking book, Dr. Lenore Walker has provided a thorough update to her original findings in the field of domestic abuse. Each chapter has been expanded to include new research. The volume contains the latest on the impact of exposure to violence on children, marital rape, child abuse, personality characteristics of different types of batterers, new psychotherapy models for batterers and their victims, and more. Walker also speaks out on her involvement in the O.J. Simpson trial as a defense witness and how he does not fit the empirical data known for domestic violence. This volume should be required reading for all professionals in the field of domestic abuse. For Further Information, Please Click Here!

In the landmark Lavallee decision of 1990, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that evidence of "battered woman syndrome" was admissible in establishing self-defence for women accused of killing their abusive partners. This book looks at the trials of eleven battered women, ten of whom killed their partners, in the fifteen years since Lavallee. Drawing extensively on trial transcripts and a rich expanse of interdisciplinary sources, the author looks at the evidence produced at trial and at how self-defence was argued. By illuminating these cases, this book uncovers the practical and legal dilemmas faced by battered women on trial for murder.

Donald Downs offers an analysis of the injustices behind the logic of battered woman syndrome, concluding that this very logic harms those it is trying to protect. This work seeks to rethink the criminal justice system.

Available for the first time ever in trade paperback, Dale Carnegie's enduring classic, the inspirational personal development guide that shows how to achieve lifelong success. One of the top-selling books of all time, "How to Win Friends & Influence People" has sold more than 15 million copies in all its editions.

This book takes as its operating premise that violence against women is prevalent throughout the world, that intimate violence is an important aspect of the broader problem of violence against women, and that the legal system has a crucial part to play in combating all forms of violence against women.

Testimony on battered woman syndrome (BWS), as a widely used self-defense strategy, has been accepted in all state courts of America. However, courts often hold that expert testimony on the BWS is inadmissible in a presented evidence where (1) it is irrelevant and immaterial to the issue of whether defendant acted in self-defense at the time of the battery; (2) the subject of the expert testimony isn't within the understanding of the jury; (3) the BWS is not sufficiently developed as an accepted scientific knowledge to warrant testimony under the guise of expertise; and (4) its prejudicial impact outweighs its probative value. For the first time in the legal scholarship, an attempt was made to use the Grounded Theory Model to analyze narratives and facts of twelve court holdings on BWS, to reach a facile consistency in defendants' sworn-in motivations on reasonableness and imminence of danger that made them kill their spouses in self-defense, also to find correlations between the expert testimonies of BWS, counts of charges, and the verdicts or dispositions rendered. Through inductive coding of the case narratives and expert testimonies, we then applied the Mantel-Haenszel method to produce pooled odds ratio of the codes. Kruskal-Wallis statistic was used for the ranked ordinal data; Poisson regression was used for prediction analysis as to the influence of narratives and expert testimonies (continuous variables) on the adjudications (dichotomous variable); Pearson linear correlations were used to find associations between the numerical variables - coded narratives and length of the sentence in prison. Findings suggest that expert testimony of BWS is admitted in 58.3 % of the holdings. In 14.3 % of hearings, the conviction is shifted from murder to manslaughter. The average duration of the battered women's sentence is 12.4 years. The charges are distributed for voluntary manslaughter (25%), reckless manslaughter (8.3%), possession of the firearms (8.3%), murder of the first or second degrees (16.7%), attempted murder of the second and third degrees (16.7%), assault of the second and third degrees (33.3%), kidnapping (8.3%), and breach of peace (8.3%). Expert testimony of BWS is influential when defendant proves that she reasonably believed that she would be killed at the time of the incidence (relative risk (RR) 1.75), history of illicit drug or alcohol abuse by the diseased (RR 2.0), the aggressors' (diseased) former verbal assaults to kill the defendant (RR 2.0), and the aggressor's criminal history (RR 1.4). These testaments are in substantial component associations with the judgments in favor of the defendant (r-square 0.89-0.91, p